This John Hansard Gallery exhibition brings together eight international artists whose work examines the relationship between public and private identities and the extent to which broadcast and lens-based media cross from one sphere into the other. Bringing together classic, recent and new film, video, sound and photographic works by Vito Acconci, Sophie Calle, Frances Goodman, Philippine Hoegen, Mako Idemitsu, Mark Lewis, Hayley Newman and Gillian Wearing, the exhibition explores the potential for media-based art to address issues of the personal, the confrontational, the curious and the intrusive.

Unprincipled Passions focuses on the development of technology and its increasingly intrusive relationship to the private sphere. Advances in communication, broadcast and surveillance technologies erode time and distance to provide the viewer with an immediate gaze upon worldwide events such as the Gulf War and the collapse of the World Trade Center. Society is increasingly torn between increased surveillance for security and law enforcement, and the apparently incompatible demand for the protection of privacy. At the same time, technology has increasingly enabled the exploration of the private, by, for example, the almost universal use of the hand-held video camera and omnipresent CCTV. Contemporary culture has driven the legitimisation of voyeurism by the growth of victim television programmes like the confessional talk shows hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer and reality television programmes like “Big Brother”, in the interests of entertainment. Unprincipled Passions offers a number of artists who, on the one hand infiltrate this controversial territory and, on the other, offer a critique.

A major international conference Unprincipled Passions: emotion and modernity is timed to coincide with the exhibition. Following on from two highly successful Critical Interventions events, Evil and Obscene Powers, the Unprincipled Passions conference seeks to examine the complex emotional ‘history’ of modernity and explores the redefinition of emotional life in response to processes, systems and technologies that have led to the increasing intrusion of non-coercive systems of power into the private, public and cultural spheres